1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the distribution of information over a computer network, and in particular, to a system and method for processing customer complaints by parsing of nested electronic mail documents over a computer network, such as the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet is fast proving to be one of the most significant technological developments of the current era. Originally developed in the United States as a cooperative effort of the United States Government known as the Advanced Research Project Agency Network (ARPANET) to tie universities and research and development organization to their military customers, the Internet has now exploded to link computer users world-wide. The Internet is an interconnected system of computer networks of varying types with terminals, usually computer stations, communicating with each other through a common communication protocol, e.g. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Through this interconnected system of computer networks, the Internet serves as the underlying infrastructure that facilitates a global system of communication known as the world wide web.
Piggy-backed input on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the Internet is available to anyone with a telephone line and a computer with modem. Both businesses and private users are taking advantage of the Internet in rapidly increasing numbers for communications of a diverse nature.
One reason for the rapid integration of the Internet into daily activities is that the Internet provides improved efficiencies in communication. For example, messaging over the Internet is very quick, even to remote locations throughout the world. Responses are also typically very quick.
Internet communication has been minimally regulated and continues to involve lowering costs, typically requiring only the cost of a computer terminal and a periodic Internet Service Provider (ISP) fee. Additionally, Internet communications are pervasive, providing easy access from every user on the Internet to millions of other users, almost regardless of physical location.
Because of these efficiencies, one form of communication that has quickly migrated to the Internet is advertising. Advertisers are able to generate and send bulk mailings at a fraction of the cost of mail, telephone, radio, and other commonly accepted types of advertising. Programs exist that quickly merge commercial advertisement messages with reference lists of Internet user addresses and automatically send out many thousands of advertisements in a single day at almost no cost to the sender. Instead, a substantial portion of the costs is born by the intermediary transmission entities and the end users.
Unfortunately, the indiscriminate nature of broadcast advertising over the Internet has led to many problems. To deliver a message in volume and thereby take advantage of the efficiencies of the Internet, senders frequently use commercially generated reference lists of Internet user addresses. These reference lists are very labor intensive and costly to compile in any manner other than randomly. Thus, many Internet broadcasters use random lists of user addresses to send their advertising, transmitting unwanted messages to a large number of disinterested Internet users for every interested Internet user.
Internet users typically resent this random “junk mail” cluttering up their cyberspace mailboxes. Consequently, random advertising over the Internet in the form of electronic mail is commonly referred to, rather unaffectionately, as “spamming.” Angry recipients of this type of Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) advertising have gone so far as to react in simultaneous, damaging, electronic backlashes aimed at particularly notorious junk mail-generating entities.
Large volumes of electronic customer complaints (several thousand per month) sent to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) regarding UCE advertisements and other service disruptions are handled by a help desk or Customer Service Center (CSC). The CSC employs full-time staff to analyze and respond to the large volume of complaints. Each complaint requires review, logging, trouble ticket review, correlation with other complaints, response to the complainant, categorization, validation, distribution to appropriate staff, and resolution. Currently, electronic customer spam complaints are manually processed by the ISP. However, the volume of complaints is large and growing.
Accordingly, the inventors of the present invention have recognized a need for automating a significant portion of the manual processing of spam complaints by developing a method and system for the parsing of nested Internet electronic mail documents.